'Nother Solent

About that letter you meant to write to the Radio Times all those years ago...

Forget it, you obsessive. It's my unwritten letter from eighteen years ago that deserves to finally get an airing.

My post about clones from the other day reminded me of a 1988 BBC drama called First Born, based on a book called Gor Saga* by Maureen Duffy.

Here's a plot summary from an Amazon review:

A doctor inseminates a Gorilla named "Mary" with human sperm.The first line in the series is about how the child looks human; because it is. The story follows Gordon through infancy, childhood, and adulthood. As a child (with ape-strength)he has difficulty talking, until an operation gives him speech. Yet he exhibits many ape-habits; for instance he spends time in trees, sleeps "under" his bed, and grunts ... He chooses to become a Priest and live a life of peace, yet when he finds out who his real mother was, a Priest tells him he's not one of God's creation, just man's creation.

I remember the series as being convincing and thrilling, but the scene with the priest bugged me. Did the writer have to make him so thick? I took it then that the priest was meant to be a Catholic; it's reasonable to assume that if ever such genetic manipulation did become possible the Pope of the day would oppose it being done. But there is no reason to suppose that disfavour would extend to the innocent people born as a result of such manipulation. Plenty of people are born even now in 1988 (I thought but did not get round to writing) as a result of practices opposed by the Church: fornication, adultery and rape. Surely very few, and those few so ignorant that they would have trouble getting through a seminary, would hold that being a child conceived as a result of rape, for instance, disbars that person from the possiblity of sainthood on exactly the same terms as every other human being.

I also seem to recall that the priest told Gordon that he had no soul, or at least was unable to confirm that he did have a soul. Once again, I was irritated that the priest was portrayed as never even having thought that having the ability to ask whether one has a soul might supply its own answer.

That's what Kirk says to McCoy in Spock Must Die, anyway. The point seems good to me.

*Gor was an unfortunate choice of name, given the interminable series of porn/fantasy novels by John Norman featuring a planet also called Gor. If one is called upon to read passages from these works aloud, best replace every fifth noun with the word "hedgehog." And drink up like a sportsman.

Why bloggers bash the MSM:

because it sometimes is indistinguishable from satire and sometimes traitorous.

Extreme? Follow the links. Both descriptions are literally true.

Did we really need a study to tell us this?

Clone 'would feel individuality'

A cloned human would probably consider themselves to be an individual, a study suggests.

Scientists drew their conclusions after interviewing identical twins about their experiences of sharing exactly the same genes with somebody else.

I drew my indentical conclusions after a rigorous programme of twenty seconds' thought. Your clone, should you reading this get one or be one, will be genetically equivalent to your identical twin. That's all. Clones don't grow up in half the time: Revenge of the Sith is fictional. Whether they end up obeying orders blindly or having a penchant for white body armour will depend, as it does for the rest of us, on how they are brought up and whether they are introduced to fan culture at an impressionable age.

Irrespective of one's beliefs about the rightness of human cloning there has never been the slightest reason to suppose that persons so produced will have less than the full complement of human feelings.

Britblog Roundup is here again. This post from Biased BBC is among those featured. Angry is right.

I expect my readers here are fairly likely to go there anyway. But, as ever, the idea of the roundup is to suggest new destinations. For instance I hadn't heard of either Muhajababes, the book reviewed in this post or of "Feminish", the blog doing the reviewing. Like all the best reviews it bounced between reviewer and book:

The picture of the young Middle East I got in Muhajababes was relieving - but it’s the story of the old liberalism/communitarianism chestnut. You can have limitless choice in a liberal set-up: go to whatever churches or mosques you like, drive a car, die your hair purple or cover it in silk, and from that liberalism opt into whatever sets of communitarian rules you like (for example, opting into rules that say go to this particular mosque, don’t drive a car, and only cover your hair in, say, blue nylon that doesn’t go with your eyes). But what happens when everyone hops from liberalism’s choices onto the same restrictive communitarian bandwagon? What becomes of freedom-of-choice then when, for example, 85% of women in your country have veiled? Who’s protecting the right-to-choice of the other 15%?

Here's an earlier post about getting the same book. Natasha, the pacifist reviewer, knows Allegra, the pro-Iraq war author.

And then - bam! It’s arrived. I knocked it on my head, rubbed the silky smooth finish on my cheek and bashed it and boshed it to see how real it is. I shouted out loud and hit the front with my index finger - It’s real. It’s here. She’s really done it. A real proper, sassy, nails book. Allegra you rock.